[R] Strange behaviour

[Paul Murrell]

Hi


v.demart at libero.it wrote:
> As an absolute beginner I'm reading and practicing with the Verzani doc to learn R.
> 
> Now, being an expert latex user who wants to integrate graphical capabilities if R and latex, using the "Simple" library and the simple.scatterplot examples I had a go at:
> 1)   Including the resulting graph into a doc.snw then compiled through sweave & latex;
> 2) Produce the graph  in pdf format directly (using pdf(filename) at the very beginning and before issuing the "simple.scatterplot " command) and including it into the latex file via \includegraphics.
> 
> In both cases the graph is a set of numbered rectangles. Investigating into the pdf files generated by R I found that they are made of 2 pages: the first contains those nasty rectangles while the second the "right" graph that should be inserted.
> 
> The same result comes out if I try the "layout" command example in the help of the same package.
> 
> My question is: is there a way to tell R to produce the second page only as a final pdf file?
> If not, any suggestion for a way out.


The "nasty rectangles" are the output of the layout.show() function. 
This function draws a simple diagram (consisting of nasty rectangles) to 
indicate the regions that a call to layout() has set up.  It is designed 
to help users to understand what on earth the layout() function is 
doing.  (It is NOT a necessary part of setting up an arrangement of 
plots using the layout() function.)

I suspect that the author of "simpleR" may have accidentally left the 
layout.show() call in simple.scatterplot() when copying the example from 
the layout() help file (apologies to John Verzani if this is an unfair 
diagnosis).

So the immediate solution to your problem is to remove the line ...

     layout.show(nf)

... from simple.scatterplot().  The output should then be a single page 
which should "include" ok in latex.

The larger problem of how to get at individual pages of output is 
probably best solved using something like the "onefile" argument to 
devices.  For example, look at the files produced by ...

     pdf(onefile=FALSE)
     example(layout)

... and at the help page for pdf() to see more about how to do this.

Hope that helps

Paul
-- 
Dr Paul Murrell
Department of Statistics
The University of Auckland
Private Bag 92019
Auckland
New Zealand
64 9 3737599 x85392
paul at stat.auckland.ac.nz
http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~paul/